


These Girls Are Coming For You

by whaleofatime



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future Fish, Alternate Universe - Never Met, F/F, Genderswap, I'm sorry in advance for the mad mashup of your prompts, Tachibana Makoto Birthday Exchange 2019
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21534925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whaleofatime/pseuds/whaleofatime
Summary: A day out at the beach when the weather's warm and the sea's calm is generally the stuff of dreams, but Rin's luck has always run a little contrary to reasonable expectations.Or,How Rin meets Makoto.
Relationships: Matsuoka Rin/Tachibana Makoto
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: Tachibana Makoto Birthday Exchange 2019





	These Girls Are Coming For You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mamodewberry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mamodewberry/gifts).



This is  _ so _ embarrassing, Rin thinks to herself as the rip current tears her away from the beach. If her bikini top comes off, she’s going to be  _ pissed _ . This is probably karma for telling her mother that it’s fine, if she can be a professional swimmer who primarily trains in Australia of all places, she can go to the beach by herself.

Rin is careful to keep her head above water; do enough open water training and being caught in an undertow or a rip current is a clear and present danger, and she’s dealt with this before.

Admittedly, the one time she had gotten caught it was during training, there were plenty of pro swimmers out there with her, and she was in her competition suit, so staying afloat had been pretty easy even if the panic had been worse. This time she’s in a heinous bikini, because Gou had wanted to  _ match _ but then had ditched her, and why’s a girl gotta get stuck in a potentially dangerous situation when she’s dressed at her most vulnerable and she’s just been dumped by her sister?

It’s just one of _those_ days, Rin thinks to herself as she presses one hand to her chest to hold her (admittedly! Not very! ample!) chest in and with the other she starts to try swimming across the current, eyes on the beach. It’s deserted this early in the day, and it’s just another reminder of the absolute dumbassery of going for a splash at the beach for a sulk, then deciding to swim a few laps in open water without a spotter. 

She’s going to burn this bikini when she gets home, Rin thinks to herself, before deciding that honestly if there’s no one here then there’s no one who’s going to mind potential toplessness. The current’s a little stronger than she expected, and while Rin’s got full confidence in her swimming, being dragged out to open water is still just that side of too ill-advised, even for someone who rarely listens to good sense when she could listen to herself instead.

It’s fortunate, probably, that Rin’s never developed a fear of the ocean, despite losing her father in a storm at sea. It’s spite, probably. Nobody and nothing gets to take anything from Rin she doesn’t want to give, and she most certainly won’t let it happen twice! The razzing she will get from her mother and sister if this is how she dies! Her coach will be at her funeral, going _this is why I told you to have recovery days_! Being put on a tapering break this far ahead of competition despite vehement requests to the contrary is already bad enough, thank you very much.

Spite maybe isn’t enough of a motivator to stave off death every time (after all, Rin’s certain that if being determined enough could keep somebody alive, her father would still be around), but for now it has her gritting her teeth as she slices through the water, breaking out of the current mere moments after being caught in the first place. 

It feels like a lifetime, she's out of breath, and it's been a while since Rin has found herself thinking about her father's death, so all in all? What a shitty day. Near-death experience got her in bullet-time mode, which gave her ample opportunity to go over the weird, achy thoughts she would much prefer to completely ignore.

Deciding that if she's going to be in a bad mood she might as well work it out of her system before she rolls back home tired and buzzing at the edges, Rin flops over onto her back to just… decompress. The sun is out in full now, and the pleasant heat helps her to re-centre herself.

Well…. The sun, and years of putting in the effort to address the tire fire that was her teenage years. No one person should cry so much in so little time, all the while aggressively marinading in teen angst and too much fancy soap. Rin credits friends and family for getting her through that, and as she got older she started to credit the effort she put in too, and it’s been… better. 

She’s never been a stranger to hard work, after all.

Thoughts all aligned in a row, Rin rolls her shoulders, wishes she had had the forethought to bring her waterproof music player with her, and slowly comes apart at the seams. She’s at home, the sun is warm and the sea is cool, she has the week off in Iwatobi for tapering before the whole family fly out to Tokyo, and the hotel her mother has booked is extremely close to the Olympic village.

Anxiety’s not as common of a companion now that she’s been a professional swimmer for more than a few years, but Tokyo 2020 will do a number on you if you’re a Japanese swimmer on home turf no matter how well-adjusted you are, probably. Rin idly floats around, wondering how long she can get away with this before the sun gets her red right across her nose, when she’s startled by a lot of shouting and even more splashing.

Looking up, Rin doesn’t spot the source of the commotion immediately. The beach is still mostly deserted, and barely any cars are out and about yet this early on a weekend. She’s half-worried that she had imagined the whole thing before the splashing gets rapidly louder and closer, and that’s when Rin realises that someone is, in fact, swimming towards her.

Confused, Rin slowly starts paddling towards them. Initially she had wondered if Gou had ditched her breakfast meet-up with a visiting friend to come join her, but long red hair is pretty easy to spot, and Gou, while an overwhelmingly competent swimmer, is not this ferocious in the water.

Rin doesn’t have a hell of a lot of time to think things through before the swimmer surfaces right by her, and suddenly she’s got a faceful of, oh my  _ god _ , the single most attractive woman she’s ever seen in the entirety of her life.

Rin’s a professional athlete with a generally amorous attitude; the world is  _ full  _ of incredibly attractive woman, and yet here, on this day when she’s wearing an extremely flimsy leopard-print bikini, is when she must come face to face with the person God decided to use as proof of his abilities should he choose to flex.

It takes a while for thoughts to process, but Rin eventually manages to flash a big smile (not the teeth! The teeth!) and flirtily drop a “Hi, you.”

Further conversation is halted completely when she realises the woman looks absolutely terrified, is holding on to her with bone-white knuckles as she struggles to stave of hyperventilating, and is fully-dressed in what looks like a neat uniform.

Worry edging out unbearable thirstiness, Rin treads water and holds the newcomer up by her waist, trying to figure out the sequence of events that led to this moment. “Hey, are you okay? Did you pull a muscle?”

One doesn’t usually pull a muscle on land and then roll out this far into the sea, and Rin knows she’s not asking a reasonable question even as she asks it, but the woman she’s holding looks like she’s completely out of it, and running her mouth is helping Rin keep calm as she deals with the second emergency of the day.

The woman’s breathing is coming in shorter and shorter pants, and Rin makes the executive decision that enough is enough. She tries to remember the lifeguard training she had when she was working part-time in Sydney, and wrenches the woman’s arm up around her shoulder, making sure that her head remains above water.

It both helps and is utterly awful that woman is completely immobile. It’s easier to swim to shore with someone who isn’t struggling, but her quiet rigidity is creeping Rin the hell out. She spots her obnoxiously bright neon green beach towel from a distance, and heads right for it. She has dry clothes there, and her phone, as well as a protein bar and a fresh towel. Rin’s got no idea which of these things might help the woman she’s currently rescuing, but it’s definitely better than nothin' but sand.

Out of the water, the woman’s incredible build and height become evident, but Rin doesn’t have a chance to admire it as much as she would want to, instead staggering under the additional weight as her feet sink into the sand. It’s a struggle, but soon they reach her blessed beach towel, and Rin’s never been happier to see fluorescent green in her life. As gingerly as she can manage, Rin kneels and offloads the woman onto the towel, and tries to lay her out comfortably. At some point between her reaching Rin and Rin reaching shore, she seems to have lost consciousness, and Rin is fucking terrified that the woman had swallowed water while Rin had been focused on swimming. 

Nothing for it. She fumbles and grabs her phone out of her bag, hitting speed dial and turning on speakerphone before turning to her, ah, patient. She can feel a pulse, but not much breathing. The training centre Rin’s based at made CPR training mandatory for all athletes based there after a terrible incident a couple of years ago, so while Rin waits for the call to connect she takes a deep breath, and ducks down to begin mouth-to-mouth.

It’s like something out of an extremely cheesy movie, but Rin really shouldn’t be shocked by this because the whole day has already been like an awful sitcom, but with 2 inches between their mouths and the Most Beautiful Woman in the World wakes up with a start, dragging in deep, shuddering breaths as Rin reels backwards, extremely grateful to have avoided being headbutted.

They share a tense moment staring at each other, before the woman flushes red so deeply and so quickly it gives Rin a headrush. It can’t be normal, and Rin’s so busy being concerned she doesn’t hear the “Hello? Rin, is that you?” coming from her phone.

“Hey,” Rin says as softly as she can, the 3rd time she’s tried a greeting. “You okay?”

The woman nods, still looking away, so Rin perseveres. “You wanna tell me what happened out there? Or, how about just start with a name?” While she waits for the woman to gather herself, Rin moves on autopilot and pushes a snack into her hands, and pulls out a towel to start drying the almost-drowning-victim. She’s been an older sister for much of her life, and even if the circumstances leading up to the messy rescue are unclear, these fundamental acts of looking after another person aren’t difficult. It buys them both time, and once Rin’s satisfied with how well she’s dried off the woman, she reaches over for her windcheater to pull on something dry.

God, leopard-print bikini in Iwatobi is such an awful look, and Gou cannot be allowed to get away with convincing her that it’s appropriate swimwear.

Rin’s about to reach over and rip open the candy bar herself when the woman seems to gather enough of herself to look up through unfairly thick lashes, and shyly says “Hi. I’m Makoto.”

Keen to not make it obvious how badly she wants to stare, Rin just flashes a toothy grin. “Hi, Makoto, nice to meet you. I’m Rin. How’re you feeling?”

Tugging the towel around her shoulders tighter, Makoto brushes a lock of drenched hair behind her ear. “Pretty embarrassed,” she admits, still beet-red but still looking at Rin. “I was walking by on my way to work, and I thought I saw someone being pulled out to sea. The currents here can be a bit tricky, and when I saw you floating I thought you had passed out.” She laughs, but it comes off like she’s laughing at herself. “That was my rescue attempt.”

That explains the neat collared shirt and the cute slacks, and why Makoto still had them one when she had dashed into the water, but it doesn’t explain everything to Rin. “Thanks, the rip current was a bit of a shocker, but after I got out of it I was just floating around.” It feels like there’s more to the story, and while she’s not really known for delicacy, Rin doesn’t want to distress her lady-knight in shiny armour more than she has to. “Uh. Did you pull something trying to swim out to me? Your form was looking great, but then you suddenly stopped, and….” It’s a doozy trying to come up with an ending to the sentence that wasn’t just,  _ that freaked me the hell out, what the hell happened to you? _ , so Rin ends lamely with “If you got cramped up or something, I can help.”

Makoto shakes her head, and looks miserable. “This is going to sound really stupid,” she whispers, and Rin doesn’t know much about this girl aside from her name and her tendency to run headfirst into danger at the first sign of trouble but she knows this isn’t going to be stupid, “but, uhm. I’m. Mmm.” The blush that had been receding a little before comes back again full-force. “I’m terrified of the ocean.”

Rin blinks, and then blinks, and blinks once more for good measure. “You’re scared of the sea,” Rin tries to clarify, “so when you saw someone you thought was drowning, your first instinct was to rush in anyways?”

The smile she gets from Makoto is equal parts embarrassed and determined. Makoto tugs at a loose thread in the towel, and breaks eye contact. “Well,” Makoto starts, before stopping and clearing her throat. “They’re really big on decisive action at the fire station, and generally if we didn’t do things that scared us we wouldn’t get much done.” She draws her head up and her shoulders back, and with the bearing of someone you absolutely would want to see in an emergency, smiles at Rin with the burning surety of a thousand suns. “I thought you were in trouble, so nothing was going to stop me from trying to help.”

Rin’s struck dumb, because 1. Face of an angel is a whole-ass emergency responder who literally works in the business of saving lives; 2. God, hauling equipment and people sure does explain why Makoto’s shoulders and back look like a revelation sent down by overnight delivery straight from Heaven; and 3., Rin’s never been so attracted to somebody so quickly in her life. 

Makoto seems to take the silence as a general sign of displeasure, because she fidgets with the towel again, clearly embarrassed. “It doesn’t sound cool when I ended up being the one who needed saving, huh?”

That spurs Rin into action, even if it’s her rolling her eyes and clicking her tongue. “You literally dived headfirst into your biggest fear because someone needed saving, and your day job is literally running headfirst into fire because somebody needs saving. What part of that doesn’t sound cool to you?” Rin’s absolutely serious, because literally what could be cooler? Oh, and that wasn’t even the whole of it. “Not to mention, your swim stroke’s  _ gorgeous _ . Trust me, I’d know. I’m a professional.”

_ Good job _ , Rin thinks to herself. Casually drop in a fun fact about yourself to lowkey appeal to Makoto. It’d be great if she can allude to being an Olympian before she asks her saviour

(?) out for brunch. What a great plan! 

Makoto’s whole face lights up, and if she had been blindingly gorgeous before, this is like a punch to the face Rin is happy to endure. It feels a lot like how it felt to bask in the sun just minutes ago, and it’s hard-going trying to resist closing her eyes and sighing in comfort.

“Oh, I thought you looked familiar! Aren’t you Team Japan’s-”

“Rin?” A new voice calls out. “What’s going on?”

-

Fem!Rin, created [here](https://picrew.me/image_maker/114808).

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Tachibana Makoto Birthday Exchange 2019, this is for mamodewberry! I got a bit overexcited when I saw your list included genderswap (which I love) and MakoRin (which I also love), 2 things I don't get to play with enough. There's a dash of Firefighter!Makoto in here too, because something's got to explain those Shoulders and that Back, and a splash of character study, because everyone is just so moody all the time.
> 
> There's a continuation to this but because things got a little out of hand, pls get in touch so I can check a couple of things with you before I post the next chapter! 
> 
> Hope you liked it thus far, mamodewberry! :D
> 
> [tumblr](https://cetaceans-pls.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/andthensomelion)


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